The ideal worlds in which you participate come to assume ever greater weight as compared to the embodied and always only present life-world that is taken to be the only one. Additionally, who or what you are in these worlds, if anyone can be anything at all, bears little relation to your more or less distinct identity in the empirical realisations of these worlds.

The world of and in experience is embodied and participatory and as such has its source in the birth of a single individual, but every content of experience belongs to life in general and is independent of that individual. You could even say that a large part of life consists of the individual's failed attempts to assert sovereignty over the life embodied in it. Ultimately, what is expressed in experience has as little to do with the individual's narrative as that narrative's claim on the origination of its own being.

Every form of understanding falls short, and it is know as falling short, is dispassionately criticised and put aside, as hopeless, as mere repetition, or as possibly promising and to be taken up again at a later time. There is deep dissatisfaction with the ability to come up with new forms, a frustration with known limitations, but the judgment continues, calmly immediate, testing, rejecting, as if it knows what is being looked for but is unable to clarify it, to bring it forward, to find the worthy vehicle.

The thought experiment of imagining that you and your whole world came into existence a few minutes ago with all memories n place makes the hidden assumption that your being is of the same kind as that of things, is ontic rather than ontological. It is enough to note that your present moment is not a point but a structure extending indefinitely backward and forward in time, in the very time that you createm which is time as it is.

That things behave in orderly and predictable ways is a reflection of the seeing and does not arise from the things themselves. When this predictability is analysed it yields deeper predictable structures as if in response to the questions put to it. Alternative accounts arise in different sites, from different trajectories of inquiry and engagement. These alternative accounts always skirt contradiction, instead when they appear to collide they bring about new interpretive frames i the inquiry, categories yielding to meta-categories etc. The world unfolds from the seeing, and is its reflection, its mirror image.

Appearance and Reality is too stark a duality. If Reality is what is not and can never be Appearance, Appearance is nevertheless a component of Reality and Real to that extent. Categorically there must be discrete levels, a sort of ontological spectrum between the two, and these, insofar as they are super-Appearances must be filled with living principles, with Soul in communion and communication.

Direct experience, first-hand, is a product of a complex interpretive process made on the basis of a personal context which varies from occasion to occasion. Another part of your knowledge is through inference, inductive or deductive with its grounds in hearsay, in authority, in imaginary but generally accepted entities and methods as much intuitive and aesthetic as logical. For a being whose essence is a knowingness you are mostly content with knowledge, if not counterfeit then the cognitive equivalent of paper money. The ideal of true knowledge remains something at best distant and yet to be attained, despite the sense of being not merely in the midst of it but identical with it.

There is the reality that is concealed and there is that which is unconcealed, but what is more interesting is the shadow reality that is both or is neither, or is indefinite as to whether it is one or the other.

Living nature has a quality of to-be-looked-at (as distinct from to-be-seen) independently of any gaze that is yet able to look at it, it is visually composed, and indeed this extends even to inanimate nature. We have learned that eyes have evolved many times and independently. At the same time there is that in nature which is concealed from any casual gaze and must be uncovered. All of this is prior to consciousness as we understand it. It is not that consciousness arises to meet this need to reality to be contemplated, but rather as an overflow of the intrinsic 'knowability', for want of a better word, of the real.

The act of judgment, the discrimination of value, begins as as a setting apart from the given, from the collective, but ends by drawing you back into a desire for alignment with the collective, through the utterance or the rehearsal of the discovered value. When the highest individual value is given to independence then judgment is self-defeating. A self that is entrapped in this way nonetheless suffers very little limitation of action, but it fights through every obstacle somehow from the wrong end.

In recent times the self has come to crystalise around the diaphanous concept of identity. This is partly a result and partly a reaction to the broad diffusion of the realisation that the self is both the ground of our 'being-here' and a constructed thing. But this realisation is only dimply grasped through a dense and chaotic pullulation of exactions against which some defense is needed. Light and darkness are mixed in new ways and new spectra and patterns emerge no different in kind from previous such spectra and ways.

The ordinary human state is that of being half-submerged in collective and ancestral consciousness, or more than half. It is individual only in appearance. Becoming an individual is a perilous journey that begins in this state, never strays too far from it, and is not necessary for what is regarded as a 'good life', is perhaps even a danger to it. Nevertheless there are some truths, some entire landscapes, that are only visible to the individual and at some cost.

The question is not 'what is consciousness?' but 'what is not-consciousness?', that is, what is its negation or negative? Naturally we think that the answer is inanimate stuff, dead matter, or 'rocks and stones and trees', but these of course are objects in consciousness, as is every other conceivable negative. Or you could frame it as 'what is the nothing behind consciousness, out of which it emerges and into which it returns'? The answer must go deeper that all worlds, living or dead.

If reality were a simulation then there would be one absolute hidden variable behind all phenomena, the clock-pulse of the simulating 'engine'. But this would only be true if the physical reality were primary and the subjects, or observers, the experiencers, or subject-windows were subprocesses as in any kind of up to the minute materialism - the synchronisation of which would be intractable The simulation would thus more likely be arranged in an idealist mode, that is, with weakly parallel processes for each observer, and the 'external' reality a sort of common nexus between them shading into fuzziness where required. But again, as soon as you have made this move the logical pull towards the idea of a simulation vanishes entirely.

The purpose and usefulness or otherwise of your various notions is within your own perspective the furtherance of various goal, direct or reactive, short or long term, more or less self-regarding etc., but as paradigms their significance is purely 'chemical', as adding just so much of a certain flavour, colour, potency or catalytic effect to compositions in which your intentions play no role at all, apart from said flavour or colour. Even as the hero of your own experience you are but a page or two in the book of experience as contemplated by an other eye.

It is not merely the icy precision of all appearance but that it is lived in common with an almost unimaginable plurality of other abysses.

Every positive content included in experience, in detail and in aggregates, that is, at whatever degree of 'granularity' you choose to take it, is one instance, a paradigm on a paradigmatic axis of content realised in this world, in this identical continuum. This is emphatically true for everything which is symbolised, but remains true for whatever is not symbolised, or which cannot be, all are paradigms, or eidolons. This is a perspective on the totality, and even on the infinity, which oddly consistent with the simulation idea - to the point that perhaps there is no real content to that idea but this one.

Being aware, being aware of your awareness to the point of destruction, that it is no longer awareness of anything at all, that all motive force is gone, and then out of no known motive to reassume awareness, unmodified but groundless.

The margin or disjunct between you and experience arises and disappears within experience, arises just because it disappears and disappears just because it arises. Neither of these is evidence for anything as both you and experience both are born and vanish within experience.

Perception requires both a diachronic dimension, a temporal spread of retention and protention and a synchronic, or paradigmatic dimension, one of imaginative variation of matters like and unlike the object. These are not independent but interactive in a way peculiar to your embodiment. All of this is of the mind, and of the world insofar as the mind and the world are merged with each other. None of this can be ascribed to pure awareness, but awareness must be apt for such forms. It may be apt for other forms or figures as well of which you do not know that you know.

The 'I', the knower or witness is in time as the stationary 'now' - it belongs to experience in time but does not enter into it. It is not like stepping onto a moving platform, but a sort of syncope, a collapse a fainting into time.

The currents of joy and delight that give colour to the world do not bear much scrutiny, but while you think to have discovered that they were only products your own contingent projection, your dwindling surplus of being, in fact it is the increasing weight of the law, an unbending and inscrutable law which you have always tacitly acknowledged, that is bearing down.

To put off the world like discarding a suit of clothes, the body, time and space, causality, the way things fit together, emotions, the web of relations, the endless chatter, and for this not to feel like emptiness but a homecoming, to suddenly recall yourself in the place, the real place, where it started.

Morality for the most part either sets one desire against another desire, the former more 'acceptable' than the latter, or else operates by prohibition and fear of punishment, which again pits a more basic desire desire against a more refined one. The only true counter to desire is an encompassing and non-speculative consciousness including both the desirer and its object in a global awareness, a kind of subjective bliss which short circuits the limited economy of ordinary desire.

Desire, modeled as mimetic, seems a form of covetousness, a fierce directedness towards a certain object, a choice somehow imposed, and a fantasm of the satisfaction of possession, and of who you would be in the act of that possession. More often desire does not have that tautness and literalness but is more in the way of a surrender, a melting, a suspension of resistance to being drawn by the gravitational force emanating from the object, and this is felt as rather as a welcome weakness of the will than anything that ought to be named a desire.